Long-term research project plans to digitally analyze about 80,000 seals from ancient Mesopotamia
As part of a sixteen-year project, a research team made up of scholars from the Institute for Near Eastern Archaeology at Freie Universität Berlin and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München will create a digital archive of Mesopotamian seals. Once digitized, this collection of approximately 80,000 seals will be made available to the public. The project, titled "KI¦IB: Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings" has been integrated into the Academies’ Programme, a collective research program run by eight German academies representing science and the humanities, by the Joint Science Conference (GWK).KI¦IB is the Sumerian word for "seal" and was used to refer to both stamp-shaped and cylindrical seals as well as sealed clay closures and cuneiform documents in ancient Mesopotamia. Sealing was a practice that was particularly popular among people from the fourth to the first millennium BCE living in present-day Iraq and Syria, and the oldest extensive corpus of images to survive is largely from this region. To this day, thousands of Mesopotamian seals and sealed objects can be found in museums and collections worldwide. However, only a small circle of experts has recognized their significance for visual, social, and cultural history.
The KI¦IB project, led by Elisa Roßberger from the Institute for Near Eastern Archaeology at Freie Universität Berlin and Adelheid Otto from the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, promises to transform people’s understanding of the significance of ancient seals. The interdisciplinary team with representatives from the fields of archaeology, ancient Near Eastern studies, digital humanities, and IT will begin work in 2025. The project, scheduled for completion in approximately sixteen years, will be carried out at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in Berlin and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW)/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Munich).
The depictions and inscriptions engraved on the seals provide detailed insights into ancient networks of social, political, economic, religious, and artistic interactions, as well as how cultural knowledge was transmitted, how forms of visual communication evolved, and how ideologies changed.
The work carried out as part of KI¦IB will make these ancient networks accessible to scholars and the wider public for the first time. To create the corpus, all data related to the artifacts, their images, and their inscriptions will be collected, segmented, and annotated using machine learning. The KI¦IB researchers will be aided in their work by international and interdisciplinary exchange with curating institutions, with other projects currently using digital means to explore ancient West Asia, the NFDI4Objects consortium, and, in particular, colleagues in West Asian countries.
The Latin words veritas, justitia, and libertas, which frame the seal of Freie Universität Berlin, stand for the values that have defined the academic ethos of Freie Universität since its founding in December 1948.
